JG etc.

Very cool article by Paul Sloan and Paul Kaihla of Business 2.0 Magazine. It goes into detail about many of the sites that we represent and some of the advertisers that are starting to take the plunge.

My favorite part:

Battelle compares FM’s model to a record company. He and his team are the band managers; the bloggers are the bands. The key difference is that bloggers own their content, earning 60 cents of every ad dollar. Like a band manager, FM works closely with its acts, yet ultimately it’s up to the bloggers to keep pumping out material. “If they stop writing, the ads go away,” Battelle says.

He has signed about 75 of the most popular bloggers of various stripes and hopes to land a few hundred in all. His authors range from tech-oriented guys like Arrington and Om Malik, who writes about telecom on GigaOm and just left his full-time gig with Business 2.0, to Heather Armstrong, whose deeply personal Dooce site is bringing in enough money to allow her family to live comfortably. Her enterprise has a staff of two: Armstrong and her husband.

FM’s eight-person sales force has been aggressively approaching big marketers, armed with detailed and persuasive demographics. The data has helped FM steadily boost ad rates on its sites. The average CPM doubled in the past six months to roughly $8. The aim is to get rates between $20 and $30, which, Battelle says, would put his blogs on par with sites like CNET and NYTimes.com. But thanks to the uneconomies-of-scale twist, overhead at FM sites like Boing Boing, Battelle’s top act, is almost invisible compared with that of any mainline media concern.

I like the band manager reference.